Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters.

Naraghi Anderlini, S. (2007). Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters. Boulder, London, Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Sanam Naraghi Anderlini’s book, Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why it Matters, offers an account of the role women play in supporting peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction. Much of the discourse surrounding women in conflict and peacebuilding focuses on women’s experiences of victimization, on sexual and gender-based violence, on the loss of livelihoods. As a result, the literature focusing on the relationship between women and peace – itself a small subset of the peacebuilding literature – tends to look at what peacebuilding processes can do for women.

Anderlini insists that this overlooks a crucial issue: the role women can play – and indeed are already playing – in supporting peace in conflict-affected areas. In her book, she argues that, despite the mixed success of existing efforts to support women’s substantive inclusion in peacebuilding, women and women’s movements are already significant actors in conflict-affected areas. They are already engaging extensively and in a valuable way in peacebuilding, peacemaking, and post-conflict reconstruction. This is a useful observation that often goes unaddressed in other works.

The book explores the roles of women in several key areas of peacebuilding: transforming violence and non-violent strategies for conflict prevention; peace negotiations; …